Give CNN your heartwarming tale of Christmas joy

Oh, CNN…how nice of you to sucker us in with flattery before asking us to write a story for you.

Nonbelief is on the rise. Experts predict that faith in a higher power will eventually disappear from the West, and Americans who are unaffiliated with any religious tradition are the fastest growing “religious” group in the country. If you’re an atheist, agnostic, or nonbeliever of any stripe, we want to know: How do you celebrate the holidays, if at all?

Go ahead — tell them how we can have a holiday season without religion.

(via Cuttlefish. Of course he told his story with a poem.)

Why I am an atheist – Lucas Parker

I grew up in poor neighborhoods around people who didn’t value critical thinking and like most people from her generation, my mother had grown up with a smattering of religion. She was a regular Sunday church-goer when I was a boy and she would dress me up and cart me off to sit on the wooden pew, daydreaming about action and adventure while a boring man droned on in monotone from the front of the room. About halfway through the monologue, we small children were brought downstairs into “Sunday school,” a place that I only remember for its truly extensive set of Legos. For all that I wasn’t predisposed to pay much attention to religion, I was as surrounded by it as any other kid. My parents were moderately religious. My grandparents were definitely religious. All of my aunts and uncles were religious. My peers and their parents; my schoolteachers; my bus drivers; my babysitters; friends; acquaintances; playmates; bullies; pretty much everybody I knew was at least a little bit religious and most definitely believed in God. People talked about it all the time. This was 1985, a very WASPy time for my hometown of Everett, Washington.

I was six years old and I was in trouble. I didn’t understand the scope of my dilemma at the time, but I was finding it more and more difficult to believe in God. Every night at bedtime, left to my thoughts, I would obsess about it. I would try to force myself to believe, to have faith in something that I couldn’t see or feel. I couldn’t bring myself to tell anybody about it for fear of what they might say or do. One night, it just happened: despite all of the pressure from pretty much everyone I ever interacted with, I finally had to admit to myself that I did not and could not believe in God, Jesus or the rest of it. At first I felt a terrible guilt, but as that washed over me I began to feel a little bit liberated. The only way to really have faith is to obsess over it, since it has no momentum of its own and is entirely the creation of the imagination. Now, my six-year-old imagination was freed up to explore new ideas and concepts without the underlying fear of some oppressive deity judging my thoughts and actions.

This certainly wasn’t the end of my exploration into religion and faith, as my teen years were as full of attempts to identify as anybody’s, but this was certainly the first time that I’d been that honest with myself and in the end, better represented my actual stance on the matter than my later youthful meandering. I had never heard the word “atheist” before and so I didn’t know that there was a name for how I felt and thought. I felt very alone, a feeling that has been a theme throughout my life probably because of that very event. But there was certainly no going back.

Lucas Parker
United States

Bill Donohue finds the proper bait for trolling

Bill Donohue has noticed that there are a lot of atheists running around and getting all up in his face, so the Catholic League is launching a counter-insurgency program, an Adopt An Atheist campaign, which I find kind of sweet and stupid.

Today we are launching our “Adopt An Atheist” campaign, the predicate of which is, “We want atheists to realize that there may be Christians in their community, even if those Christians don’t even know they are Christian.”

Uh, Bill…we know there are Christians in our communities. They’re all over the place, and they’re always rather loud about it. This is a campaign designed to ape what American Atheists do, and it puts Bill Donohue in an unfortunately defensive situation, in which he’s basically reacting to Dave Silverman by doing what Dave Silverman does…and it’s not going to work for him at all.

Here’s what our campaign entails. We are asking everyone to contact the American Atheist affiliate in his area [click here], letting them know of your interest in “adopting” one of them. All it takes is an e-mail. Let them know of your sincere interest in working with them to uncover their inner self. They may be resistant at first, but eventually they may come to understand that they were Christian all along.

If we hurry, these closeted Christians can celebrate Christmas like the rest of us. As an added bonus, they will no longer be looked upon as people who “believe in nothing, stand for nothing and are good for nothing.”

When atheists heard about this deal, they scrambled to beg to be “adopted”. He’s already hooked Cuttlefish, Greg, and JT, and heck, sign me up, too. Why? Because the comedic opportunities are freaking ripe. Donohue’s hooks are improperly baited — all they’re going to snag are happy atheists who’d love to see a fanatical Catholic willingly get in range for a mix of rational discussion, critical evaluation of Christian absurdities, and outright mockery.

Bill Donohue doesn’t seem to realize that he and Dave Silverman are in highly asymmetric situations (which doesn’t surprise me — Donohue is not a particularly insightful fellow). The Catholic church’s problem is not that people are unaware of them; as the largest single Christian denomination, Catholicism has name brand recognition. Their problem is that people know all about the Catholic church, and they run away screaming from it.

Its fusty medievalisms are the stuff of gothic horror novels and Dungeons & Dragons games, not contemporary life. Its most notable claim to fame recently has been raping children, and I think anyone can tell you, getting your brand name associated with child abuse, enslaving women, and providing a cushy old folks home for unrepentant pedophiles is not good marketing.

And along those lines, proposing to “adopt” people, something we usually associate with children…that’s not a good reminder to throw out there, Bill. When I first heard of this misbegotten plan to have a Catholic ‘adopt’ people like me, it wasn’t that they’d teach me to appreciate the true story of Christmas, but that my virginal anus was under threat.

Besides, I already celebrate Christmas the right way: with cephalopods on a fake tree, lefse and krumkake, kissing a pretty girl, and lounging about indolently all day long. We’ve successfully stolen the meaning of “holiday” away from the believers: instead of a day of sacred obligations, it’s now a day of freedom from obligations of all sorts — it’s a day off, when we can just relax and do what makes us and others happy.

And isn’t that what Christmas is all about?

Raising money for SSA

I’m appearing on another of these blogtv thingies this weekend — Saturday at 10pm Central.

On Saturday 10 December, SkepticTV goes live for a whole 12 hours, to raise money for the Secular Student Alliance.

STARTING TIMES:
8pm European Central Time
7pm Greenwich Mean Time
2pm Eastern Standard Time (USA)
1pm Central
12 Noon Mountain Time
11am Pacific Standard Time
Sunday 5am Eastern Standard Time (Australia)

We’ll be joined by a great many guests including PZ Myers, the League of Reason, The Jinn and Tonic Show, Trolling With Logic (and special guests Damon Fowler and Joe Zamecki), as well as some of YouTube’s finest. There will even a sneak preview of Holy Hallucinations 29 by TheLivingDinosaur, but only if you help us raise a lot of money!

Where: http://www.blogtv.com/people/skeptictv

We also have an eBay auction, where items will be going up during the show. Please check our page regularly:
http://www.ebay.com/

Our star lot is this pencil sketch of Charles Darwin, kindly donated by IncredibleMouse5:
http://www.incrediblemouse.com/charles_darwin_drawing

Our FirstGiving page for donations within the US:
http://www.firstgiving.com/fundraiser/skeptictv/skeptictv12hourforthessa

Donations from outside the US should go directly to the SSA:
https://www.secularstudents.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=1

I’m done, almost!

Oh, man. I just finished my last lecture for this semester — this was a rough term, and I feel like I just barely dragged myself over the finish line. The big strain came from the fact that I revamped everything: I completely changed the content of my neurobiology course, with a new textbook, a new emphasis, and a different direction for the labs, and some stuff worked and some stuff failed catastrophically (the last few weeks of the lab in particular were a disaster). I offer this course again in two years, and I think I can fix the bad parts by then. I also patched up a lot of material in my Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development course; not so much changes in lecture content, but stretching to reach out and get the students interacting more. That worked entirely — I got some significant improvements in average exam scores which I will take complete credit for, although it could just be that our incoming freshman class was full of geniuses this year. I also got much more disciplined in the writing course, and imposed a whole series of step-by-step deadlines on the big term paper. It required a bit more effort during the term, but the payoff is now — I’m not getting any papers dumped cold on my desk for grading, they’ve all been fussed over already.

It’s tiring, though. Show business is hard work; getting up and doing 4 or 5 lectures a week (and about half of them new) is exhausting. It would be much easier to just write this stuff. Why didn’t anyone tell me that a career in science involved so much singing and dancing?

My neuro students are all done with their bloggery now, and here’s the final list of neurobiology weblogs I forced them to start. Some might fade away after this, others may move on to new sites, some might keep going. However it works out, this can be my little public monument to Fall 2011. Stop by and congratulate them on surviving a whole semester with Old Man Myers.

Next: I’ve got final exams to give, a nice break to catch up on deadlines, and lots of preparation for next term to do. Spring will be worse, with an all-new, starting from scratch course in cancer biology to teach.

For now, I’m going into seclusion for a bit to wrap up some extracurricular writing that must get done right now. It’s not much of a celebration yet.

(Also on FtB)

But what about the men’s castration anxiety?

This is so vaguely sourced that you shouldn’t trust it all, so regard it as nothing but a humor item. The Islamic heat is rising in the grocery store.

An Islamic cleric residing in Europe said that women should not be close to bananas or cucumbers, in order to avoid any “sexual thoughts.”

The unnamed sheikh, who was featured in an article on el-Senousa news, was quoted saying that if women wish to eat these food items, a third party, preferably a male related to them such as their a father or husband, should cut the items into small pieces and serve.

He said that these fruits and vegetables “resemble the male penis” and hence could arouse women or “make them think of sex.” Bikyamasr.com cannot independently verify the accuracy of the news item at time of writing.

He also added carrots and zucchini to the list of forbidden foods for women.

It’s ridiculous, it’s funny, it’s stupid, and it’s so blatantly absurd that I’m not going to believe it until I see some confirmation, but still…we live in a world where Islamic clerics declare that allowing women to drive will end virginity, so mere absurdity is no longer sufficient to rule out a story.

I’m done, almost!

Oh, man. I just finished my last lecture for this semester — this was a rough term, and I feel like I just barely dragged myself over the finish line. The big strain came from the fact that I revamped everything: I completely changed the content of my neurobiology course, with a new textbook, a new emphasis, and a different direction for the labs, and some stuff worked and some stuff failed catastrophically (the last few weeks of the lab in particular were a disaster). I offer this course again in two years, and I think I can fix the bad parts by then. I also patched up a lot of material in my Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development course; not so much changes in lecture content, but stretching to reach out and get the students interacting more. That worked entirely — I got some significant improvements in average exam scores which I will take complete credit for, although it could just be that our incoming freshman class was full of geniuses this year. I also got much more disciplined in the writing course, and imposed a whole series of step-by-step deadlines on the big term paper. It required a bit more effort during the term, but the payoff is now — I’m not getting any papers dumped cold on my desk for grading, they’ve all been fussed over already.

It’s tiring, though. Show business is hard work; getting up and doing 4 or 5 lectures a week (and about half of them new) is exhausting. It would be much easier to just write this stuff. Why didn’t anyone tell me that a career in science involved so much singing and dancing?

My neuro students are all done with their bloggery now, and here’s the final list of neurobiology weblogs I forced them to start. Some might fade away after this, others may move on to new sites, some might keep going. However it works out, this can be my little public monument to Fall 2011. Stop by and congratulate them on surviving a whole semester with Old Man Myers.

Next: I’ve got final exams to give, a nice break to catch up on deadlines, and lots of preparation for next term to do. Spring will be worse, with an all-new, starting from scratch course in cancer biology to teach.

For now, I’m going into seclusion for a bit to wrap up some extracurricular writing that must get done right now. It’s not much of a celebration yet.

(Also on Sb)